Page 141 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

was not sorry that he had spoken out; he believed that his question had to
be asked. “Many people have made a lot of this, asking, ‘Who were you
to be asking these questions?’ I’ll tell you who I was,” Powell said. “I was
the senior military advisor and the principal military advisor to the presi-
dent, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the vice president.
It was very much my responsibility even though it rankled people. But
rankling people comes with the job, and if you’re not prepared to rankle
people, you shouldn’t have the job.”
The next day General Powell and the national security team gathered
at Camp David with the president while General Norman Schwarzkopf
gave everyone an in-depth briefing on the military options, including what
it would take to eject the Iraqi forces and liberate Kuwait. When Presi-
dent George H. W. Bush returned to Washington from Camp David on
Sunday armed with a credible plan, he stepped off the helicopter, walked
to a podium on the south lawn of the White House, faced the reporters
and the television cameras, and confidently told the world that this aggres-
sion against Kuwait would not stand. “‘This will not stand,’ his famous
expression on that Sunday morning, did not mean he was going to use
military force. It meant that this will not stand, and what did he do? He
took it to the United Nations,” Powell explained. “He got a variety of res-
olutions telling Iraq to get out, and, frankly, it was our policy until January
to try to resolve the issue peacefully and get the Iraqis to leave. The best
evidence I’ll give of this point is that Secretary of State Jim Baker went
to see Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, at the very last minute and
he was rebuffed. That’s when war became inevitable. We were ready for
it. We had deployed 500,000 troops, and we succeeded in carrying out
the mission.”
Slightly more than ten years later, General Powell found himself on
the opposite side of the policy-making table when, as secretary of state, he
served as an advisor to President George W. Bush on the impending 2003
invasion of Iraq. In early September 2002, two days before a scheduled
briefing of the National Security Council in Washington, Powell called
U.S. Army General Tommy Franks, who was to lead the invasion. Powell
had grave concerns that the forces would be insufficient to carry out the
mission.
“I was secretary of state, neither secretary of defense nor chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff anymore, that’s true. But I was a retired four-star

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